This is the epicenter of the outbreak, where your average novel doesn’t dare venture. This is Noah Britton fighting his way through the heart of the zombie freakin’ apocalypse. The high school is on lockdown but the infection has already invaded its borders. It’s too late. Screams echo through the halls, blood stains the lockers, the dead don’t die for long. Mutilated, half eaten corpses wander the halls in search of the living. These aren’t your normal slow moving corpses that trudge along hoping for victims. No. They run faster. Fight harder. Know no pain. Show no weakness. Offer no reprieve. Noah must make the ultimate sacrifice and decide who to save and who to leave behind. What ranks higher in these desperate times; friendship or strategy? Can old rivals put aside their differences and work together for the greater good or will human emotions lead to the end of the world as we know it? The edge of your seat intensity never dies as Noah, his neurotic bus driver, his best friends, his worst enemies, the girl he likes, the girl he hates or loves or who the hell even knows anymore and a power hungry rival desperate for control all try to co-inhabit a school bus in search of a safe haven that may no longer exist. Gruesome. Intense. Graphic and Brutally violent. Yet emotionally driven with enough heart to sustain a dying species taken off life support. The characters tear themselves from the pages, forcing their way into your heart, demanding you continue when it all gets to be too much. This is hope. This is strength. This is the end. And it’s only the beginning.

    Exotic beasts and improbable travelers roam restlessly through these darkly diverting and finely honed tales.In “The Situation,” a beleaguered office worker creates a child-swallowing manta-ray to be used for educational purposes (once described as Dilbert meets Gormenghast). In “Three Days in a Border Town,” a sharpshooter seeks the truth about her husband in an elusive floating city beyond a far-future horizon; “Errata” follows an oddly familiar writer who has marshaled a penguin, a shaman, and two pearl-handled pistols with which to plot the end of the world. Also included are two stories original to this collection, including “The Quickening,” in which a lonely child is torn between familial obligation and loyalty to a maligned talking rabbit.Chimerical and hypnotic, VanderMeer leads readers through the postmodern into a new literature of the imagination.

    Nor can she bring herself to tell the other women in her life: her friends, her doctor, her mentor, her mother. The freedom not to be a mother is one of the victories of feminism. So why does she feel like a failure?Piercingly intelligent and darkly funny, The Life of the Mind is a novel about endings: of youth, of professional aspiration, of possibility, of the illusion that our minds can ever free us from the tyranny of our bodies. And yet Dorothy's mind is all she has to make sense of a world largely out of her control, one where disaster looms and is already here, where things happen but there is no plot. There is meaning, however, if Dorothy figures out where to look, and as the weeks pass and the bleeding subsides, she finds it in the most unlikely places, from a Las Vegas poolside to a living room karaoke session. In literature--as Dorothy well knows--stories end. But life, as they say, goes on.

    Terrance Thurber spends this year teaching his children about the natural world: they listen to the heartbeat of trees, track animal footprints, sleep under the star-filled sky. Despite these lessons, he doesn’t show them how to survive without him. And when these seasons of trying and failing to quit booze and be a better man are over, Terrance is gone.Alone with their artist mother, Catrin, the Thurber children are left to grapple with the anger they feel for the one parent who deserted them and a growing resentment for the one who didn’t. As Catrin withdraws into her own world, Jamie throws herself into painting while her brothers smash out their rage in brutal, no-holds-barred football games with neighborhood kids. Once they can leave—Jamie for college, Lewis for the navy, and Connor for work—they don’t look back.But Terrance does. Crossing the country, sobering up, and starting over has left him with razor-sharp regret. Terrance doesn’t know that Jamie, now an academic, inhabits an ever-shrinking circle of loneliness; that Lewis, a merchant marine, fears life on dry land; that Connor struggles to connect with the son he sees teetering on an all-too-familiar edge. He only knows that he has one last try to build a bridge, through the years, to his family.Composed of a series of touchstone moments, Tiny Americans is a thrilling and bittersweet rendering of a family that, much like the tides, continues to come together and drift apart.

    Since her death in 1965, her place in the landscape of twentieth-century fiction has grown only more exalted.As we approach the centenary of her birth comes this astonishing compilation of fifty-six pieces—more than forty of which have never been published before. Two of Jackson’s children co-edited this volume, culling through the vast archives of their mother’s papers at the Library of Congress, selecting only the very best for inclusion.Let Me Tell You brings together the deliciously eerie short stories Jackson is best known for, along with frank, inspiring lectures on writing; comic essays about her large, boisterous family; and whimsical drawings. Jackson’s landscape here is most frequently domestic: dinner parties and bridge, household budgets and homeward-bound commutes, children’s games and neighborly gossip. But this familiar setting is also her most subversive: She wields humor, terror, and the uncanny to explore the real challenges of marriage, parenting, and community—the pressure of social norms, the veins of distrust in love, the constant lack of time and space.For the first time, this collection showcases Shirley Jackson’s radically different modes of writing side by side. Together they show her to be a magnificent storyteller, a sharp, sly humorist, and a powerful feminist.This volume includes a foreword by the celebrated literary critic and Jackson biographer Ruth Franklin.

    It follows the life of Don Wanderhop from his childhood in an immigrant Calvinist family living in Chicago in the 1950s through the loss of a brother, his faith, his wife, and finally his daughter-a tragedy drawn directly from De Vries's own life. Despite its foundation in misfortune, The Blood of the Lamb offers glimpses of the comic sensibility for which De Vries was famous. Engaging directly with the reader in a manner that buttresses the personal intimacy of the story, De Vries writes with a powerful blend of grief, love, wit, and fury.

    The poems’ subject is the natural world, but their images would never occur in nature. This book is serious and funny at the same time, like a big grave with a clown lying in it.

    But it won't, because Misha's late Beloved Papa whacked an Oklahoma businessman of some prominence. Misha is paying the price of exile from his adopted American homeland. He's stuck in Russia, dreaming of his beloved Rouenna and the Oz of NYC. Salvation may lie in the tiny, oil-rich nation of Absurdistan, where a crooked consular officer will sell Misha a Belgian passport. But after a civil war breaks out between two competing ethnic groups and a local warlord installs hapless Misha as Minister of Multicultural Affairs, our hero soon finds himself covered in oil, fighting for his life, falling in love, and trying to figure out if a normal life is still possible in the twenty-first century. Populated by curvaceous brown-eyed beauties, circumcision-happy Hasidic Jews, a loyal manservant who never stops serving, and scheming oil execs from a certain American company whose name rhymes with Malliburton, Absurdistan is a strange, oddly true-to-life look at how we live now, from a writer who should know.

    Toni Morrison uses modernist techniques of stream-of-consciousness, multiple perspectives, and deliberate fragmentation. Two different narrators tell the story. The first is Claudia MacTeer, who narrates in a mixture of a child’s and an adult’s perspectives, and the second is an omniscient narrator. Claudia’s and Pecola’s points of view are dominant, but the reader also sees things from other character’s points of view.The subtext of the first part of the novel ('Autumn' and 'Winter') suggests various topics. In my presentation, I mainly focus on the “Dick and Jane narrative” by means of which the novel opens. Furthermore, I will explore the themes “whiteness as the standard of beauty” and “seeing versus being seen” which are sometimes closely connected.'The Bluest Eye' provides an extended depiction of the ways in which internalized white beauty standards deform the lives of black girls and women. Implicit messages that whiteness is superior are everywhere, including the white baby doll given to Claudia, the idealization of Shirley Temple, the consensus that light-skinned Maureen is cuter than the other black girls, and the idealization of white beauty in the movies. Pecola eventually desires blue eyes in order to conform with these white beauty standards imposed on her.However, by wishing for blue eyes, Pecola indicates that she wishes to see things differently as much as she wishes to be seen differently.

    A former resident of St. Louis, where he founded the Observable Poetry reading series, he now lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina.

    Waking up in a creepy mausoleum, she is forced to endure three nights of indescribable agony. Her life is forever altered when she is transformed into a monster of myth and legend; a vampire. Lonely and full of despair, she comes face to face with the irresistible and enigmatic Lord Lucentio. Justice bringer for the European Vampire Council, Luc has been sent to Australia to kill Natalie's maker, but someone has already beaten him to it. He quickly discovers that Nat is far from an ordinary fledgling. He suspects that she is Mortis, a figure of both hope and dread among their kind. Natalie is propelled into a dark and mysterious underworld that takes her far away from her hometown of Brisbane. Her arrival was foretold long ago and her fate is already sealed. Nat's entire species is in danger and it is her job to save them. She desperately wants to escape from the burden that has been thrust upon her, but she is inextricably linked to a two thousand year old prophecy. An unknown enemy has begun to whittle down their already limited numbers. If Nat fails to accept her destiny, all vampires will soon cease to exist.

    He had been found guilty of conspiring with the devil to seduce an entire convent of nuns in what was the most sensational case of mass possession and sexual hysteria in history. Grandier maintained his innocence to the end and four years after his death the nuns were still being subjected to exorcisms to free them from their demonic bondage. Huxley's vivid account of this bizarre tale of religious and sexual obsession transforms our understanding of the medieval world.

    Poplar Farm has been in Louise’s family for generations, inherited by her sharecropping forbearer from a white landowner after a lynching. Now the farm has been carved up, the trees torn down—a mini-massacre replicating the history of many farms before it, and the destruction of lives and societies taking place all across America. Architect of this destruction is Paul Krovik, a property developer soon driven insane by the failure of his ambition. Left behind is a half-finished "luxury suburb” of neo-Victorian homes on the outskirts of a sprawling midwestern city. To Paul it is a collapsed dream, but to Julia and Nathaniel, arriving from their small Boston apartment, it is a new start, promising a bucolic future. With their son, Copley, they buy Paul’s signature home in a foreclosure sale and move in to their brave new world. Yet violence lies just beneath the surface of this land, and simmers deep within Nathaniel. The remaining trees bear witness, Louise lives on in her beleaguered farmhouse, and as reality shifts, and the edges of what is right and wrong blur and then vanish, Copley becomes convinced that someone is living in the house with them.

    Duff bares the creaky, embarrassing parts of our high school cafeteria-scarred souls for us, leaving us no choice but to laugh at our failures, no matter how spectacular, and rejoice in our successes, no matter how itty-bitty. She shows women that each one of us is a wonder in our own way, with the ability — whether we know it or not — to make the best of life’s often absurd situations. Reading If You Did What I Asked In the First Place is like sitting down with a good friend who helps you make it through the day. Pour yourself a glass of whatever makes you feel better and take off any constricting undergarments: Let loose with the knowledge that you are not alone. You have Lori at your side.

    This pocket-sized edition features full-color illustrations by Matt Kish, illustrator of the critically acclaimed Moby-Dick in Pictures: One Drawing for Every Page.